India’s first years of freedom were plagued by the tragic legacy of partition. Refugee resettlement, economic disruption and inadequate resources for virtually every need, continuing communal conflicts (as more than 10 percent of India’s population remained Muslim), and, within a few months of independence, the outbreak of undeclared war with Pakistan over Kashmir were but a few of the major difficulties confronting the newborn dominion. Mountbatten remained in New Delhi to serve as India’s first new governor-general, mostly a ceremonial job, while Nehru took charge of free India’s responsible government as its first prime minister, heading a Congress cabinet, whose second most powerful figure was Patel.

Gandhi, who accepted no office, chose to walk barefoot through the riot-torn areas of Bengal and Bihar, where he tried through his presence and influence to stop the communal killing. He then returned to Delhi, and there he preached nonviolence daily until he was assassinated by an orthodox Hindu Brahman fanatic on Jan. 30, 1948. “The light has gone out of our lives,” Prime Minister Nehru said, “and there is darkness everywhere.” Yet Nehru carried on at India’s helm, and, owing in part to his secular, enlightened leadership, not only did India’s flood of religious hatred and violence recede but also some progress was made toward communal reconciliation and economic development. Nehru spoke out fearlessly against India’s “caste-ridden” and “priest-ridden” society, which, as a Hindu Brahman pandit, he could do without fear of too much upper-caste criticism. His charismatic brilliance, moreover, continued to make him a major vote winner in each election campaign that he led (1951–52, 1957, 1962) throughout his 17 arduous years in office as the Congress—opposed only by minor parties and independent candidates—dominated political life. Nehru’s modernist mentality and cosmopolitan popularity helped to hide the traditional continuity of India’s internal problems, few of which disappeared under his leadership.

Government and politics

The Dominion of India was reborn on Jan. 26, 1950, as a sovereign democratic republic and a union of states. With universal adult franchise, India’s electorate was the world’s largest, but the traditional feudal roots of most of its illiterate populace were deep, just as their religious caste beliefs were to remain far more powerful than more recent exotic ideas, such as secular statehood. Elections were to be held, however, at least every five years, and the major model of government followed by India’s constitution was that of British parliamentary rule, with a lower House of the People (Lok Sabha), in which an elected prime minister and his cabinet sat, and an upper Council of States (Rajya Sabha). Nehru led his ruling Congress Party from New Delhi’s Lok Sabha until his death in 1964. The nominal head of India’s republic, however, was a president, who was indirectly elected. India’s first two presidents were Hindu Brahmans, Rajendra Prasad and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the latter a distinguished Sanskrit scholar who had lectured at Oxford. Presidential powers were mostly ceremonial, except for brief periods of “emergency” rule, when the nation’s security was believed to be in great danger and normal constitutional procedures and civil rights were feared to be too cumbersome or threatening.

India’s federation divided powers between the central government in New Delhi and a number of state governments (crafted from former British provinces and princely states), each of which also had a nominal governor at its head and an elected chief minister with his cabinet to rule its legislative assembly. One of the Congress’s long-standing resolutions had called for the reorganization of British provincial borders into linguistic states, where each of India’s major regional languages would find its administrative reflection, while English and Hindi would remain joint national languages for purposes of legislation, law, and service examinations. Pressure for such reorganization increased in 1953, after the former British province of Madras was divided into Tamil Nadu (“Land of the Tamils”) and Andhra (from 1956 Andhra Pradesh), where Telugu, another Dravidian tongue, was spoken by the vast majority. Nehru thus appointed the States Reorganization Commission to redesign India’s internal map, which led to a major redrawing of administrative boundaries, especially in southern India, by the States Reorganization Act, passed in 1956. Four years later, in 1960, the enlarged state of Bombay was divided into Marathi-speaking Maharashtra and Gujarati-speaking Gujarat. Despite these changes, the difficult process of reorganization continued and demanded attention in many regions of the subcontinent, whose truly “continental” character was perhaps best seen in this ongoing linguistic agitation. Among the most difficult problems was a demand by Sikhs that their language, Punjabi, with its sacred Gurmukhi script, be made the official tongue of Punjab, but in that state many Hindus, fearing they would find themselves disadvantaged, insisted that as Hindi speakers they too deserved a state of their own, if indeed the Sikhs were to be granted the Punjabi suba (state) for which so many Sikhs agitated. Nehru, however, refused to agree to a separate Sikh state, as he feared that such a concession to the Sikhs, who were both a religious and a linguistic group, might open the door to further “Pakistan-style” fragmentation.

Foreign policy

Nehru served as his own foreign minister and throughout his life remained the chief architect of India’s foreign policy. The dark cloud of partition, however, hovered for years in the aftermath of India’s independence, and India and Pakistan were left suspicious of one another’s incitements to border violence.

The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir triggered the first undeclared war with Pakistan, which began a little more than two months after independence. Prior to partition, princes were given the option of joining the new dominion within which their territory lay, and, thanks to the vigorous lobbying of Mountbatten and Patel, most of the princes agreed to do so, accepting handsome pensions (so-called “privy purses”) as rewards for relinquishing sovereignty. Of some 570 princes, only 3 had not acceded to the new dominion or gone immediately over to Pakistan—those of Junagadh, Hyderabad, and Kashmir. The nawab of Junagadh and the nizam of Hyderabad were both Muslims, though most of their subjects were Hindus, and both states were surrounded, on land, by India. Junagadh, however, faced Pakistan on the Arabian Sea, and when its nawab followed Jinnah’s lead in opting to join that Muslim nation, India’s army moved in and took control of the territory. The nizam of Hyderabad was more cautious, hoping for independence for his vast domain in the heart of southern India, but India refused to give him much more than one year and sent troops into the state in September 1948. Both invasions met little, if any, resistance, and both states were swiftly integrated into India’s union.

Kashmir, lying in the Himalayas, presented a different problem. Its maharaja was Hindu, but about three-fourths of its population was Muslim, and the state itself was contiguous to both new dominions, sitting like a crown atop South Asia. Maharaja Hari Singh tried at first to remain independent, but in October 1947 Pashtun (Pathan) tribesmen from the North-West Frontier of Pakistan invaded Kashmir in trucks, heading toward Srinagar. The invasion triggered India’s first undeclared war with Pakistan and led at once to the maharaja’s decision to opt for accession to India. Mountbatten and Nehru airlifted Indian troops into Srinagar, and the tribesmen were forced to fall back to a line that has, since early 1949, partitioned Kashmir into Pakistan-held Azad Kashmir (the western portion of Kashmir) and the Northern Areas (the northern portion of Kashmir, also administered by Pakistan) and India’s state of Jammu and Kashmir, which includes the Vale of Kashmir and Ladakh. Nehru initially agreed to Mountbatten’s proposal that a plebiscite be held in the entire state as soon as hostilities ceased, and a UN-sponsored cease-fire was agreed to by both parties on Jan. 1, 1949. No statewide plebiscite was held, however, for in 1954, after Pakistan began to receive arms from the United States, Nehru withdrew his support.

India’s foreign policy, defined by Nehru as nonaligned, was based on Five Principles (Panch Shila): mutual respect for other nations’ territorial integrity and sovereignty; nonaggression; noninterference in internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence. These principles were, ironically, articulated in a treaty with China over the Tibet region in 1954, when Nehru still hoped for Sino-Indian “brotherhood” and leadership of a “Third World” of nonviolent nations, recently independent of colonial rule, eager to save the world from Cold War superpower confrontation and nuclear annihilation.

China and India, however, had not resolved a dispute over several areas of their border, most notably the section demarcating a barren plateau in Ladakh—most of which was called Aksai Chin, which was claimed by India as part of Jammu and Kashmir state but never properly surveyed—and the section bordered on the north by the McMahon Line, which stretched from Bhutan to Burma (Myanmar) and extended to the crest of the Great Himalayas. The latter area, designated as the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) in 1954, was claimed on the basis of a 1914 agreement between Arthur Henry McMahon, the British foreign secretary for India, and Tibetan officials but was never accepted by China. After China had reasserted its authority over Tibet in 1950, it began appealing to India—but to no avail—for negotiations over the border. This Sino-Indian dispute was exacerbated in the late 1950s after India discovered a road across Aksai Chin built by the Chinese to link its autonomous region of Xinjiang with Tibet. The tension was further heightened when, in 1959, India granted asylum to the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader. Full-scale war blazed in October 1962 when a Chinese army moved easily through India’s northern outposts and advanced virtually unopposed toward the plains of Assam before Beijing ordered their unilateral withdrawal.

The war was a blow to Nehru’s most cherished principles and ideals, though as a result of swift and extensive American and British military support, including the dispatch of U.S. bombers to the world’s highest border, India soon secured its northern defenses. India’s “police action” of integrating Portuguese Goa into the union by force in 1961 represented another fall from the high ground of nonviolence in foreign affairs, which Nehru so often claimed for India in his speeches to the UN and elsewhere. During his premiership, Nehru tried hard to identify the country’s foreign policy with anticolonialism and antiracism. He also tried to promote India’s role as the peacemaker, which was seen as an extension of the policies of Gandhi and as deeply rooted in the indigenous religious traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. Like most foreign policies, India’s was, in fact, based first of all on its government’s perceptions of national interest and on security considerations.

Economic planning and development

As a Fabian Socialist, Nehru had great faith in economic planning and personally chaired his government’s Planning Commission. India’s First Five-Year Plan was launched in 1951, and most of its funds were spent on rebuilding war-shattered railroads and on irrigation schemes and canals. Food grain production increased from 51 million tons in 1951 to 82 million tons by the end of the Second Five-Year Plan (1956–61). During that same decade, however, India’s population grew from about 360 million to 440 million, which eliminated real economic benefits for all but large landowners and the wealthiest and best-educated quarter of India’s urban population. The landless and unemployed lower half of India’s fast-growing population remained inadequately fed, ill-housed, and illiterate. However, Nehru’s wisdom in keeping his nation nonaligned helped accelerate the country’s economic development, as India received substantial aid from both sides of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union and eastern Europe contributing almost as much in capital goods and technical assistance as did the United States, Great Britain, and West Germany. The growth of iron and steel industries soon became a truly international example of coexistence, with the United States building one plant, the Soviet Union another, Britain a third, and West Germany a fourth. For the Third Five-Year Plan (1961–66), launched during Nehru’s era, an Aid India Consortium of the major Western powers and Japan provided some $5 billion in capital and credits, and, as a result, India’s annual iron output rose to nearly 25 million tons by the plan’s end, with about three times that amount of coal produced and almost 40 billion kilowatt-hours of electric power generated. India had become the world’s 10th most advanced industrial country in terms of absolute value of output, though it remained per capita one of the least productive of the world’s major countries.

As modernity brought added comforts and pleasure to India’s urban elite, the gap between the larger industrial urban centres and the areas of extensive rural poverty became greater. Various schemes designed to reduce rural poverty were tried, many ostensibly in emulation of Gandhi’s sarvodaya (rural “uplift”) philosophy, which advocated community sharing of all resources for the mutual benefit and enhancement of peasant life. The social reformer Vinoba Bhave started a bhoodan (“gift-of-land”) movement, in which he walked from village to village and asked large landowners to “adopt” him as their son and to give him a portion of their property, which he would then distribute among the landless. He later expanded that program to include gramdan (“gift-of-village”), in which villagers voluntarily surrendered their land to a cooperative system, and jivandan (“gift-of-life”), the giving of all one’s labour, the latter attracting volunteers as famous as the socialist J.P. (Jaya Prakash) Narayan, founder of the Janata (“People’s”) opposition to the Congress of the mid-1970s. The Ford Foundation, an American philanthropic organization, began a community development and rural extension program in the early 1950s that encouraged young Indian college students and technical experts to focus their skills and knowledge on village problems. India’s half million villages, however, were slow to change, and, though a number of showcase villages emerged in the environs of New Delhi, Bombay, and other large cities, the more-remote villages remained centres of superstition, poverty, caste division, and illiteracy.

It was not until the late 1960s that chemical fertilizers and high-yield food seeds brought the Green Revolution in agriculture to India. The results were mixed, as many poor or small farmers were unable to afford the seeds or the risks involved in the new technology. Moreover, as rice and, especially, wheat production increased, there was a corresponding decrease in other grain production. Farmers who benefited most were from the major wheat-growing areas of Haryana, Punjab, and western Uttar Pradesh.

Post-Nehru politics and foreign policy

At his death on May 27, 1964, Nehru’s only child and closest confidante, Indira Gandhi, was with him. Long separated from her husband—Feroze Gandhi, by then deceased—Indira had moved into Teen Murti Bhavan, the prime minister’s mansion, with her two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay. She had accompanied her father the world over and had been the leader of his Congress Party’s “ginger group” youth movement, as well as Congress president, but, as a young mother and widow, she had not as yet served in parliament nor on her father’s cabinet and, hence, did not put herself forward as a candidate for prime minister. Though it appeared that Nehru was grooming her as his successor, he had denied any such intention, and his party instead chose Lal Bahadur Shastri as India’s second prime minister. Shastri had devoted his life to party affairs and had served Nehru well both inside and outside his cabinet. His modesty and simplicity, moreover, appealed to most Indians.

The 1965 war with Pakistan

Almost immediately after Shastri took office, India was faced with a threat of war from Pakistan. Pakistan’s president, Mohammad Ayub Khan, had led a military coup in 1958 that put him in charge of his country’s civil and military affairs, and his regime had received substantial military support from the United States. By 1965 Ayub felt ready to test India’s frontier outposts, first in the Sindh (Sind) and then in Kashmir. The first skirmishes were fought in the Rann of Kachchh (Kutch) in April, and Pakistan’s U.S.-made tanks rolled to what seemed like an easy victory over India’s counterparts. The Commonwealth prime ministers and the UN quickly prevailed on both sides to agree to a cease-fire and withdrawal of forces to the prewar borders. Pakistan, however, believed it had won and that India’s army was weak, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayub’s foreign minister, urged another round in Kashmir that summer, to which Ayub agreed. In mid-August Pakistan launched “Operation Grandslam” with the hope of cutting across the only significant overland route to Kashmir before India could bring up its outmoded tanks. India’s forces, however, moved a three-pronged tank attack aimed at Lahore and Sialkot across the international border in Punjab early in September. The great city of Lahore was in range of Indian tank fire by September 23, when a UN cease-fire was agreed on by both sides. Each country’s army had suffered considerable losses and had run low on ammunition as a result of the immediate decision by the United Kingdom and the United States to embargo all further military shipments to both armies. Shastri was hailed as a hero in New Delhi.

A Soviet-sponsored South Asian peace conference was held early in January 1966 at Tashkent, in what was then the Uzbek S.S.R., where Ayub and Shastri finally reached an agreement on January 10 to “restore normal and peaceful relations” between India and Pakistan. The next morning, however, Shastri was dead of a heart attack, and the Tashkent Agreement hardly outlived him. Before the month’s end, Indira Gandhi, who had served in Shastri’s cabinet as minister of information and broadcasting, had been elected by the Congress Party to become India’s next prime minister. She easily defeated her only rival, Morarji Desai.

Indira Gandhi’s impact

Indira Gandhi’s soft-spoken, attractive personality masked her iron will and autocratic ambition, and most of her Congress contemporaries underestimated her drive and tenacity. During her first year in office, she visited Washington, where she won substantial support for India’s weakened economy, and her subsequent visit to Moscow reflected the continuation of her father’s policy of nonalignment. Trying to defuse Sikh agitation, moreover, and as a reward for Sikh military service in the Kashmir war, she granted the long-standing Sikh demand of a Punjabi suba (state), which required partition of the existing state of Punjab but left its newly designed capital of Chandigarh as shared administrative headquarters of the new states of Punjab, with a Sikh majority, and Haryana, with a slight Hindu majority.

Several years of poor monsoons had conspired with wartime spending to undermine India’s economy, and Prime Minister Gandhi’s subsequent decision to devalue the rupee cost her party considerable losses at the polls in India’s fourth general elections, in 1967. Although the Congress, with 283 seats (of 520), was still considerably larger than any of the various left- and right-wing opposition parties, none of which gained more than 44 seats, her overall Lok Sabha majority was reduced from some 200 (which she had inherited) to fewer than 50. The Congress, moreover, lost most of the more than 3,400 elective seats in the state assemblies, and Gandhi felt obliged to invite Desai into her cabinet as deputy prime minister and finance minister. As leader of Gujarat’s wealthy banking and business elite, Desai was considered a pillar of economic stability, whose presence in New Delhi would swiftly restore confidence in the Congress government.

India’s first Muslim president, Zakir Husain, was also elected in 1967, but his death two years later opened a wider rift in Congress leadership and gave Gandhi the opportunity of taking more power into her own hands, as she began rejecting the advice and support of her father’s closest colleagues of the old guard, including Desai, whom she forced out of her cabinet. For president she backed her own candidate, Vice President V.V. (Varahagiri Venkata) Giri, against the majority of her party’s leadership, who favoured the Lok Sabha speaker Neelam Sanjiva Reddy; she proved to be a skillful political manager for Giri, who was easily elected. Because of this, the old guard of the Congress Party expelled Gandhi for “indiscipline,” but, refusing to be intimidated, she rallied most of the elected members of parliament to her “New Congress” standard and led a left-wing national coalition of communist and provincial Dravidian and Akali parties from Punjab and Tamil Nadu. Desai led the old guard, a minority of Congress members who remained as the prime minister’s opposition in the Lok Sabha but who could not thwart any of her major legislation, including a constitutional amendment to abolish former princely pensions in 1970. Gandhi called new elections at the end of 1970, and—sweeping the polls the following March with the promise “Eliminate poverty!”—her party won 350 seats in a Lok Sabha of 515.

The Bangladesh war

In December 1970 Pakistan held general elections, its first since independence. The Awami League, headed by East Pakistan’s popular Bengali leader Mujibur Rahman (Sheikh Mujib), won a clear majority of seats in the new assembly, but West Pakistan’s chief martial law administrator and president, Gen. Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, refused to honour the democratic choice of his country’s majority. At the end of March 1971, after failed negotiations in which Mujib demanded virtual independence for East Pakistan, Yahya Khan ordered a military massacre in Dhaka (Dacca). Though Mujib was arrested and flown to prison in West Pakistan, he called on his followers in the east to rise up and proclaim their independence as Bangladesh (“Land of the Bengalis”). Some 10 million refugees fled across the border from East Pakistan to India in the ensuing eight months of martial rule and sporadic firing by West Pakistan’s army. Soon after the monsoon stopped, India’s army moved up to the Bangladesh border and by early December had advanced virtually unopposed to Dhaka, which was surrendered in mid-December. Mujib, released by Pres. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had taken over from the disgraced Yahya Khan, flew home to a hero’s welcome, and in January 1972 he became the first prime minister of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

India’s stunning victory over Pakistan in the Bangladesh war was achieved in part because of Soviet military support and diplomatic assurances. The Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation, signed in mid-1971 by India with the Soviet Union, gave India the arms it used in the war. With the birth of Bangladesh, India’s already dominant position in South Asia was enhanced, and its foreign policy, which remained officially nonaligned, tilted further toward the Soviet Union.

In a last-ditch but futile effort to support Pakistan, a nuclear-armed aircraft carrier of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was sent to the Bay of Bengal, ostensibly to evacuate civilians from Dhaka, but the war ended before any such assistance could be rendered. Many Indians viewed the aircraft carrier’s presence so close to their own shores as provocative “nuclear weapons rattling,” and by 1972 India launched an atomic program of its own, detonating its first plutonium-armed device under the sands of Rajasthan in May 1974. The atomic explosion was felt in Pakistan’s neighbouring Sind province and triggered that country’s resolve to produce a bomb of its own as swiftly as possible. Pakistan subsequently forged stronger ties with China and with Muslim countries to the west but found itself further diminished as a potential challenge to Indian hegemony over South Asia.

Emergency rule

The Bangladesh war raised Prime Minister Gandhi to virtual “mother goddess” stature at home. She was viewed as a brilliant military strategist and diplomat, and her popularity was never greater than in the years immediately after that brief December war. By late 1974, however, Gandhi’s golden image had tarnished, for, despite her campaign rhetoric, poverty was hardly abolished in India. Quite the contrary, with skyrocketing oil prices and consumer-goods inflation, India’s unemployed and landless, as well as its large fixed-income labouring population, found itself sinking deeper into starvation’s grip and impossible debt. Student strikes and mass protest marches rocked Bihar and Gujarat, as Narayan and Desai joined forces in leading a new Janata Morcha (“People’s Front”) movement against government corruption and Gandhi’s allegedly inept leadership. The mass movement gathered momentum throughout the first half of 1975 and reached its climax that June, when the Congress lost a crucial by-election in Gujarat and Gandhi herself was found guilty by Allahabad’s High Court of several counts of election malpractice during the last campaign for her Lok Sabha seat. The mandatory penalty for that crime was exclusion from holding any elective office for six years from date of conviction.

Opposition leaders threatened a civil disobedience campaign to force the prime minister to resign, and many of her oldest cabinet colleagues and Congress Party advisers urged her to step down pending an appeal to India’s Supreme Court. Following instead the advice of her ambitious and energetic younger son, Sanjay, on June 26, 1975, Gandhi persuaded Pres. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to declare a national emergency, which empowered her to do whatever she considered best for the country for at least six months. The elite Central Reserve Police force, the prime minister’s palace guard, was ordered to arrest Desai and the ailing and aged Narayan, as well as hundreds of others who had worked with her father and Mohandas Gandhi in helping India to win its freedom from British rule. She then blacked out the entire region of Delhi in which the press was published and appointed Sanjay as her trusted personal censor of all future news leaders and editorials. Her minister of information and broadcasting, Inder K. Gujral, immediately resigned rather than accept orders from Sanjay, who held no elective office at the time but who clearly was becoming one of the most powerful persons in India. “India is Indira, and Indira is India,” was the call of Congress Party sycophants, and soon the country was plastered with her poster image. Practically every leader of India’s political opposition was jailed or kept under house arrest for almost two years, and some of India’s most prominent journalists, lawyers, educators, and political activists were muzzled or imprisoned.

Gandhi announced her Twenty-Point Program soon after the emergency was proclaimed, and most points were aimed at reducing inflation and energizing the economy by punishing tax evaders, black marketers, smugglers, and other real criminals. Prices did come down, production indexes rose dramatically, and even the monsoon proved cooperative by bringing abundant rains on time two years in a row. At the same time, however, popular discontent was fostered by some of the emergency acts, such as a freeze on wage increases, pressure for increased worker discipline, and a birth-control program initiated by Sanjay that mandated sterilization for families with more than two children. It was perhaps because of the economic gains that the prime minister decided early in 1977 to call general elections, but she may also have believed what she read about herself in her controlled press or feared a military coup had she simply refused to seek a civil mandate for her policies. Most political prisoners were released, and Narayan immediately joined Desai in quickly revitalizing the Janata movement, whose campaign warned Indians that the elections might be their last chance to choose between “democracy and dictatorship.” In the elections, held in February, Indira and Sanjay both lost their Lok Sabha seats, as did most of their loyal followers, and the Congress was reduced to just 153 seats, 92 of which were from four of the southern states. The Janata Party’s 295 seats (of a total 542) gave it only a modest majority, but opposition candidates together represented more than two-thirds of the Lok Sabha.

The Janata interlude and the return of Indira Gandhi

At the age of 80, Desai took the post of prime minister. Although Narayan was too sick to accept any office, there were others in the Janata Party, especially Charan Singh, of the Jat peasant caste, who considered themselves at least as worthy of becoming prime minister as Desai, and the petty squabbling over power and all the perks of high office kept the new leaders in Delhi so preoccupied that little time or vital energy was left with which to address the nation’s crying problems and needs. Freedom did return, however, including laissez-faire in all its worst forms, and inflation soon escalated, as did smuggling, black-marketing, and every form of corruption endemic to any poor country with underpaid bureaucrats and undereducated police. Even the rains failed Desai, whose high-spending regime soon used up the substantial surplus in food grains that Gandhi had amassed in new storage facilities.

Politically, perhaps the worst error made by Desai was to insist on punishing Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi, both of whom were accused of many crimes, none of which would be easy to prove in any Indian court. In November 1978 Indira Gandhi had again been elected to the Lok Sabha, but this time as a member of the Congress (I) Party (the I stood for Indira), which she and her supporters had formed that year. She was expelled from the Lok Sabha the following month and then briefly imprisoned, but this action brought a strong backlash of sympathy for her from millions of Indians, many of whom a year earlier had feared her as a tyrant.

No major legislation was introduced by the new government, which in a year of inaction seemed incapable of solving any of India’s problems and lost the confidence of most of the populace. In mid-July 1979, Desai resigned rather than face a no-confidence motion that had been tabled in the Lok Sabha and would easily have passed. Charan Singh was then selected prime minister, but just a few weeks later he too resigned. President Reddy, who had been elected along with Desai in 1977, called for new elections and dissolved parliament in the winter of 1979.

In January 1980 India’s seventh general election returned Indira Gandhi to power over New Delhi’s central government. The Congress (I) Party, which had run on the slogan “Elect a government that works,” won 351 of the 525 contested Lok Sabha seats, as against 31 for Janata. Sanjay Gandhi also won election to the Lok Sabha and resumed his former post as head of the Congress’s youth wing (the Youth Congress). Though he remained outside his mother’s cabinet, he personally selected half of the Congress’s successful Lok Sabha candidates, and it appeared that he was being groomed as her successor. In June 1980, however, Sanjay Gandhi was killed in the crash of a new stunt plane he was flying. Indira Gandhi, who seemed never fully to recover from the loss of Sanjay, immediately recruited her elder son, Rajiv, into political life. Rajiv had been a pilot until his younger brother’s death but took up politics at his mother’s insistence.

Sikh separatism

India’s problems of poverty, pluralism, inequities in development and gross disparities in wealth and education, and continuing provincial and communal violence did not disappear or diminish. The worst violence erupted in Punjab, where, ironically, the majority of the Sikh population had gained affluence in the wake of India’s Green Revolution of the late 1960s. Yet bumper crops and higher per capita incomes brought all the gadgets and toys of modernity, which pulled or lured many younger Sikhs away from ingrained tradition and religious values that others considered sacred. This opened large gaps within Sikh society, almost as wide and deep as those that separated Punjab from the rest of India. Though Mrs. Gandhi had agreed in 1970 to transfer Chandigarh to the recently divided Punjab as its sole capital, that simple act had never been carried out, for Haryana’s mainly Hindu populace vigorously demanded adequate compensation if their state were to be deprived of so valuable an asset. The prime minister tried to appease Sikh frustrations by appointing a Sikh, Zail Singh, as her home minister, in charge of police nationwide, yet most of the leaders in Chandigarh and Amritsar distrusted Singh and soon came to distrust Gandhi even more. Though in 1982 she nominated Zail Singh to be the first Sikh president of India, even that symbolic elevation of a member of the small Sikh minority to the highest office in India’s secular republic failed to quell the rising storm over Punjab.

By the early 1980s some Sikhs were calling for more than mere separate provincial statehood, instead demanding nothing less than a nation-state of their own, an autonomous Sikh Khalistan, or “Land of the Pure.” More moderate Sikh leaders, such as Harchand Singh Longowal, who was elected president of the Akali Party in 1980, unsuccessfully attempted to avert civil war by seeking to negotiate a settlement of Sikh demands with New Delhi’s Congress leaders. Extremists like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale won the support of many younger devout Sikhs around Amritsar, who were armed with automatic weapons and launched a violent movement for Khalistan that took control of the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple (Harimandir), and its sacred precincts. Gandhi and her government seemed unable to do anything to stop the growing number of politically motivated killings and acts of terror in Punjab, Haryana, and Delhi. She knew that nationwide elections would have to be called by January 1985, and the overwhelming Hindu majority of India’s electorate would likely judge her government too weak to be retained. In 1984, therefore, Gandhi gave her generals permission to launch their “Operation Bluestar,” as it was code-named, against the Golden Temple. Early in June, after a night of artillery fire, they moved tanks and troops into the temple precincts, and for four days and nights the battle raged, until Bhindranwale and most of his snipers were dead. Hundreds of innocent people were caught in the cross fire, and at least 100 soldiers died. Khalistan had its first martyrs. In retaliation, on Oct. 31, 1984, Gandhi herself was shot dead by two of her own Sikh guards inside her garden in New Delhi. The next day mobs of bloodthirsty thugs began to roam the Sikh neighbourhoods in and around Delhi, where they set fire to cars, homes, and businesses and launched a massacre of Sikhs that left thousands dead and many more thousands wounded and homeless in the worst religious riot since partition.

The night Indira Gandhi died, her son flew back to New Delhi from West Bengal, where he had been on the campaign trail. Pres. Zail Singh also flew home, from a visit to the Persian Gulf, and swore in the 40-year-old Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister, though he had not even been a member of his mother’s cabinet. Several days later, on the eve of his mother’s funeral, Rajiv decided to call out the army to stop the orgy of murder and terror in Delhi. Several well-known leaders of the Congress (I) Party in Delhi were accused by human-rights activists of having incited the Hindu mobs to violence, but none was ever accused in any court of law or sentenced to any jail term.

India since the mid-1980s

The premiership of Rajiv Gandhi

Rajiv Gandhi wisely opted to call for fresh elections nationwide soon after taking office, and, reaping the sympathy vote for his mother’s murder, won the December 1984 election by the largest majority ever amassed by any party leader in independent India. In her own violent death, Indira Gandhi thus assured her son’s succession to the post of power for which she had carefully groomed him during the last four years of her life.

With the Congress (I) winning more than 400 seats in the Lok Sabha, Rajiv Gandhi could have passed virtually any legislative program he wanted. He chose to work toward removing onerous licensing restrictions and other bureaucratic red tape relating to high-technology imports and the establishment of foreign-funded factories and other businesses in India. The new prime minister hoped to lead India into the computer age, and, departing from his grandfather’s Fabian Socialist predisposition toward Great Britain and his mother’s leaning toward the Soviet Union—which continued to bolster India’s air and sea defenses—Rajiv Gandhi looked more to the United States for help and to American technology as his favoured model for India’s development. Though hundreds of millions remained unemployed or underemployed and illiterate, he stopped emphasizing, as his grandfather and mother had done, the need to abolish or even diminish poverty for India’s lower half, instead addressing himself more to the captains of Indian industry and commerce and advocating a trickle-down theory of economic growth.

Because of his youth, Gandhi represented the ascension of a new generation to power and brought with him the hope of resolving some of India’s long-standing problems. His initial popularity, however, began to diminish after his first two years in office, and charges of mismanagement became common. His greatest political challenge, though, resulted from problems with a member of his own cabinet, Minister of Finance V.P. (Vishwanath Pratap) Singh, who by 1987 had conducted investigations into the machinations of several of India’s leading industrial and commercial families and houses whose reputations for tax evasion were notorious. In January of that year, Singh found himself suddenly transferred to the Ministry of Defense, but his crusade against corruption continued in his new ministry, where he found signs of financial kickbacks in the procurement of arms, especially from the Swedish firm of Bofors. A political uproar followed, and Singh, charging that the government was hindering his investigation, resigned from the cabinet in April.

By 1989 Gandhi, as well as the Congress (I), was still tainted by charges of corruption, and recent price increases on essential goods made the Congress (I) even more vulnerable to opposition parties, including the right-wing Bharatiya Janata (“Indian People’s”) Party (BJP), headed by L.K. (Lal Krishna) Advani, and V.P. Singh’s new Janata Dal. In the general elections held in November, Gandhi barely managed to retain his own Lok Sabha seat, as the Congress (I), winning only 193 seats, lost its majority. The Janata Dal (141 seats) emerged with the second largest block, and V.P. Singh, with the support of the BJP (88 seats) and the two main communist parties (44 seats), was able to put together a coalition majority that took office in December.

Foreign policy

Relations with the United States improved during the last half of the 1980s, with greater trade, scientific cooperation, and cultural exchanges. When civil rule resumed in Pakistan in 1988, India’s relations with that country also reached a new level of friendship, though the South Asian thaw proved to be brief.

In December 1985 Rajiv Gandhi had endorsed a bold initiative, helping to launch the seven-nation South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), whose annual meetings thereafter offered the leaders of India and Pakistan, as well as their smaller neighbours, unique opportunities to informally discuss and resolve problems. The problem of Kashmir was among the worst of these, though India had in the late 1980s also accused Pakistan of arming and then sending Pakistani agents across the Punjab border. In late 1989 strikes, terrorism, and unrest escalated in Kashmir, and by early 1990 the area was rocked by a series of violent explosions and fierce exchanges of heavy fire along the line of control that separated the Indian- and Pakistani-administered sectors of Kashmir. A newly vitalized liberation front in Srinagar captured the allegiance of many young Kashmiri Muslims, who may have been inspired by unrest in Israel’s West Bank or in eastern Europe or by the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to risk their lives in a struggle for freedom from “Indian occupation.” New Delhi responded by proclaiming president’s rule, suspending all local elected government, and rushing in additional troops until the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir was under curfew and martial law. New Delhi refused to discuss the matter with any foreign powers, as it insisted that the situation in the state was a purely domestic matter that could be dealt with by Indians alone.

The Indian government was also confronted by unrest in neighbouring Sri Lanka, where in the 1980s conflict between the island’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority and its Tamil Hindu minority broke out into civil war. With a large, politically powerful Tamil community of its own, India viewed the unrest with particular concern and had since the 1970s tried diplomacy to no avail. In 1987, after several SAARC meetings between Gandhi and Sri Lanka’s president, J.R. (Junius Richard) Jayewardene, the two leaders signed a peace accord that provided the Tamils with an autonomous province within a united Sri Lanka. India agreed to prevent Tamil separatists from using its territory, notably Tamil Nadu, for training and shelter and agreed to send an Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) to disarm the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) and other Tamil forces. The IPKF, however, soon found itself embroiled in fighting the Tamil Tigers. The accord had never been popular among Tamils or Sinhalese, and by 1989 the Indian government was bowing to Sri Lankan pressure to pull out its troops. In March 1990, with its mission unaccomplished, the last of the IPKF had been withdrawn.

V.P. Singh’s coalition—its brief rise and fall

V.P. Singh, who had initially denied any interest in becoming prime minister, emerged after the 1989 elections as the leader of a loosely knit coalition whose extreme wings were basically antipathetic to each other. Haryana’s Jat leader, Devi Lal, who nominated V.P. Singh for prime minister, became deputy prime minister, thus raising fears in Punjab that another period of harsh Delhi rule was about to begin. V.P. Singh’s first visit as prime minister, however, was to Amritsar’s Golden Temple, where he walked barefoot to announce that he hoped to bring a “healing touch” to Punjab’s sorely torn state. Singh promised a political solution for the region’s problems, but, reflecting the ambivalence in his new coalition, the move in Amritsar was not followed up by the transfer of Chandigarh, nor indeed by any state elections.

A similar ambivalence within the coalition was seen with respect to events in Ayodhya (in Uttar Pradesh), an ancient capital and—as most orthodox Hindus believe—birthplace of the deity Rama. The Babri Masjid, a mosque erected by the Mughal emperor Bābur in Ayodhya, was said to have been built over the very site of Rama’s birthplace, where a more ancient Hindu temple, Ram Janmabhoomi, was supposed to have stood. In the fall of 1990 a mass march of Hindus bearing consecrated bricks to rebuild “Rama’s birth temple” won the support of most members of Advani’s BJP, as well as of many other Hindus throughout India. V.P. Singh and his government, however, were committed to India as a secular nation and would not permit the destruction of the mosque, which Muslims considered one of their oldest and most sacred places. India’s police were thus ordered to stop the more than one million Hindus marching toward Ayodhya, including Advani himself, who rode in a chariot such as King Rama might have used. On October 23, the day that Advani was stopped and arrested, Singh lost his Lok Sabha majority, as the BJP withdrew its support for the coalition.

Singh had earlier come under severe attack from many upper-caste Hindus of northern India for sponsoring implementation of the 1980 Mandal Commission report, which recommended that more jobs in all services be reserved for members of the lower castes and ex-untouchable outcaste communities. After he announced in August 1990 that the recommendations would be enforced, many young upper-caste Hindus immolated themselves in protests across northern India. V.P. Singh’s critics accused him of pandering to the lower castes for their votes, and many members of his own party deserted him on this searing issue, foremost among them Chandra Shekhar, who led a splinter group of Janata Dal dissidents out of Singh’s coalition. On Nov. 7, 1990, V.P. Singh resigned after suffering a vote of no confidence by a stunning margin of 356 to 151.

Most of those who voted against the prime minister were members of Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress (I) Party, for Gandhi retained the largest single block of party faithful in the Lok Sabha; however, Advani’s BJP support also lined up against Singh. The smallest new party bloc in Lok Sabha belonged to Shekhar, whose Janata Dal (S)—the S stood for Socialist—gained the support of Gandhi and thus came to be invited by Pres. Ramaswamy Venkataraman to serve as prime minister before the end of 1990. Devi Lal, who in August had been ousted by Singh, again became deputy prime minister. With fewer than 60 Janata (S) members in the Lok Sabha, however, the new prime minister’s hold on power was tenuous and not expected to survive any longer than deemed expedient by Gandhi and the Congress (I) bloc. When the Congress (I) walked out of the Lok Sabha in March 1991, Shekhar had little choice but to resign and call upon President Venkataraman to announce new general elections.

Congress government of Narasimha Rao

The first round of the elections took place on May 20, but the following day in Tamil Nadu, in a small town just south of Madras (Chennai), Gandhi was assassinated in a suicide bomb attack. A woman apparently of Sri Lankan Tamil origin and bearing a concealed plastic bomb destroyed herself and more than a dozen others crowded around Gandhi, who, though expected to regain the post of prime minister, had abandoned his previous security precautions to campaign more vigorously. The other two rounds of the elections were postponed in respect for the young leader. After Sonia, Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, declined an invitation by the central committee of the Congress (I) to replace her husband as party president, the Congress (I) closed ranks behind P.V. (Pamulaparti Venkata) Narasimha Rao, one of its most senior leaders and diplomats, and unanimously elected him Congress (I) president.

“The only way to exist in India is to coexist,” Narasimha Rao told his pluralistic nation as election campaigning resumed in early June. Though the younger Gandhi’s assassination apparently had ended the Nehru dynasty, the Nehru legacy of secular democratic development for India remained embodied at the head of the Congress (I). Born in the southern presidency of Madras in what is now Andhra Pradesh state, Narasimha Rao had been a disciple of Mohandas Gandhi and of Nehru, had served in the Lok Sabha, and was appointed foreign minister under both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. On June 20, after the Congress (I) won more than 220 of the 524 seats contested for the Lok Sabha, Narasimha Rao was able to form a minority government and became the first Indian prime minister from a southern state. The opposition in the Lok Sabha was led by Advani, whose BJP won some 120 seats, reaching a new peak in popularity, especially in the Hindi-speaking heartland of northern India, where it took control of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. The Janata Dal gained fewer than 60 seats, just slightly more than the approximately 50 seats won by the two communist parties.

The Rao government’s nearly five-year rule was marked by many challenges. In 1992 Advani’s promise to resume his “sacred pilgrimage” to Ayodhya to erect Rama’s temple became an immediate and potentially explosive issue when, despite promises of restraint from Hindu nationalist leaders, an army of Hindu protestors tore down the Babri Masjid in December of that year. The destruction of the 464-year-old mosque ignited the country’s worst interreligious rioting since the Indian partition of 1947 and set the stage for severe clashes between Hindu and Muslim extremists during the rest of the decade.

Also in 1992, amid allegations of corruption within the Rao government, a number of bankers, brokers, and political figures were indicted in a wide-scale stock market swindle in which public funds were used to inflate stock prices in order to benefit the conspirators. These financial misdealings took place in a framework of growing economic liberalization, deregulation, and privatization that had begun under the government of Rajiv Gandhi and that continued unabated through the close of the century. India’s move toward a more market-oriented economy was fueled largely by an educational system that produced a huge number of graduates in technology and the sciences, and India experienced a dramatic growth in its high-technology and computer sectors.

The first and second BJP governments

Despite a booming national economy, the Congress—the “(I)” was by then dropped—polled poorly in the 1996 general election, falling from 260 seats in the Lok Sabha to only 140 (an all-time low). In part, this drop in Congress support stemmed from accusations of political corruption on the part of Narasimha Rao; to some extent, however, it signaled a rise in Hindu nationalism in the form of the BJP. That party increased its representation in the Lok Sabha from 113 to 161, the overall largest party representation, but no party had sufficient seats to form a government. The BJP, led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was unable to form a stable coalition, and Vajpayee held the premiership for scarcely a week.

A hastily contrived coalition, the United Front (UF), under Janata Dal politician H.D. Deve Gowda, soon was able to seat a government. But the UF relied on the support of the Congress from the outside, in exchange for continuing certain Congress policies. The coalition still proved unstable, and Gowda was replaced as prime minister in April 1997 by Inder Kumar Gujral, also of the Janat Dal. However, an interim report on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination released in November stated that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party, a member of the UF, shared responsibility in Gandhi’s death. The Congress removed its support, and, after the collapse of the UF, new elections were slated for March 1998. (The claims against the DMK were never substantiated.)

Much to the chagrin of the Congress, the BJP polled well in the March elections, increasing its membership in the Lok Sabha from 160 seats to 179. The Congress, now led by Sonia Gandhi, increased their representation slightly, garnering an additional five seats. No single party seemed to be in a position to form a government (Janata Dal had fallen to a mere six seats), and it was only after much politicking that the BJP was able to form a new governing coalition, again under Vajpayee.

The BJP coalition, called the National Democratic Alliance, crumbled in April 1999 and operated as a caretaker government until elections that fall. The BJP again had a good outing, outpolling all other parties and raising its representation in the Lok Sabha to 182 seats. The Congress representation in the lower house eroded even further, to 112 seats.

India had conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1974, but its program for developing and fielding such weapons had been covert. Under the BJP, India publicly and proudly declared itself a member of those states possessing nuclear weapons, and in May 1998—within months of the BJP coming to power—India conducted a series of five nuclear weapons tests. This apparently was interpreted as sabre rattling by Pakistan, which responded by detonating its own nuclear devices. The international community harshly condemned both sides and urged the two new nuclear powers to begin a dialogue, particularly on the unresolved question of Kashmir.

Despite several tentative steps toward rapprochement, armed conflict broke out between India and Pakistan in the high mountains of the Kargil region of Jammu and Kashmir state in May 1999. Eventually, intense international pressure induced the Pakistani government to withdraw its troops to its side of the line of control. Nonetheless, Kashmir continued to be a point of contention, and acts of terrorism conducted by extremists hoping to change Indian policy toward the region grew more common and severe.

Return of the Congress

The BJP espoused a broad Hindu nativism. During the years of BJP government, Hindu products were favoured over imports, names of cities were changed—either to reflect the precolonial name (e.g., Chennai for Madras) or to bring the name more in line with local pronunciation (Kolkata for Calcutta)—and the party openly opposed what it considered non-Hindu values.

Given India’s tradition of secular politics, many Indians were uncomfortable with the BJP’s pro-Hindu approach, and this discomfort was perhaps one of the reasons why the BJP had such a poor showing at the May 2004 elections. The Congress regained some ground lost in previous general elections, raising its representation in the Lok Sabha to 145 seats; the BJP’s membership fell to 137 seats. As had become the pattern in other recent elections, no party was situated to call a government on its own, so the Congress formed a coalition known as the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Congress leader Sonia Gandhi opted not to take the premiership, however, and instead recommended Manmohan Singh, a Sikh, for the post. The Congress made significant gains in the 2009 parliamentary elections, increasing its seat total in the Lok Sabha to 206; conversely, the BJP’s total fell to 116. Singh formed another cabinet and was sworn in for a second term, becoming the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to do so after having served a full five-year first term.

Singh had been minister of finance under Narasimha Rao until 1996, and he was the man most credited with restructuring the Indian economy during the 1990s. The election was seen by many as a turn away from the pro-urban policies adopted by the BJP. Since the early 1990s, India’s economy had boomed, particularly in the high-technology and technical-services sector. The economy in many rural areas, however, had stagnated. Farming remained largely dependent on the monsoon, and many formerly remote areas were opened up merely so that their natural resources might be exploited with little benefit to local inhabitants. The UPA espoused a strongly pro-farmer message and sought to introduce rural programs reminiscent of those of the New Deal era in the United States. The new government aimed to revitalize the agrarian economy, step up investment in agriculture, provide access to credit, and improve the quality of rural infrastructure. The government made employment generation and social equity important features of its agenda. An indication of the government’s efforts on the latter point actually began during the BJP era, when Kocheril Raman Narayanan, a Dalit (“untouchable”), served as president (1997–2002). After the Congress came to power, Pratibha Patil became the country’s first woman president in 2007, and another Dalit, Meira Kumar, was named the first woman speaker of the Lok Sabha in 2009. In addition, women began occupying senior positions in state and union-territory governments, notably in highly populated Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.

Another priority of the Singh administration was combating terrorism both at home and abroad. Along with the growth of terror by Muslim extremists, India experienced a rise in violence among communist (mostly Maoist) groups known as Naxalites. First formed in the 1960s, Naxalite groups experienced a revival in the early 21st century, espousing a doctrine of liberation and emancipation. They generally operated in the fringes of society in the most economically backward regions and were highly attractive to marginalized tribal peoples, poor rural residents, and others with grievances. The union government soon acknowledged that Naxalism, along with terrorism, presented significant threats to internal security in India. However, efforts to deter terrorist attacks did not prevent some major deadly incidents, including the bombing of multiple trains in Mumbai in July 2006, bombings in several locations in Delhi in September 2008, and the assault by armed terrorists on several buildings in central Mumbai two months later. The Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, which killed some 174 people and injured more than 300 others, greatly shocked the country.

Prior to the attacks, Singh’s government had sought to build diplomatic bridges to Pakistan. Singh had met in a summit conference with Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, in 2006, shortly after the Mumbai train bombings, which produced a joint statement in which the two sides agreed to cooperate against terrorism. Then, in October 2008, limited trade resumed between the Indian- and Pakistani-administered segments of Kashmir, the first such commerce through the region in six decades. Although the resumption of this trade signaled improved relations between the two countries, the improvement was short-lived, as India later linked the terrorists responsible for the November attacks to Pakistan, bringing bilateral relations to a new low. Singh did meet with his Pakistani counterpart, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, in 2009 and 2010 in an attempt to resume the talks started earlier with Musharraf. However, relations between the two countries remained strained.

India had better diplomatic luck with other countries. Singh’s government engaged in multilateral talks with the World Trade Organization and lobbied heavily for India to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council. It also successfully negotiated free-trade agreements with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and with South Korea, which went into effect in 2010, and signed a trade pact with Japan in 2011. In addition, India hosted the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, which were a great success, despite questions about corruption and mismanagement that arose during the construction of new facilities for the event.

Prime ministers of India

The table provides a chronological list of the prime ministers of India.